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Alienware Area-51 ALX

84

Very Good

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Pros
Superior performance
Cons
Hefty price tag

Performance: Superior: 100
Features: Fair: 61
Design: Very Good: 84

Find out how these scores, and their relative weights, combine to produce the PC World Rating.

Performance
Adobe Photoshop CS2	235
Autodesk 3ds max 8.0 SP-3 DirectX	286
Autodesk 3ds max 8.0 SP-3 Rendering	232
Firefox 2	152
Microsoft Office 2003 with SP-1	301
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0	150
Nero 7 Ultra Edition	305
Overall Graphics Score	Superior
Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator 1.5	164
Winzip Computing WinZip 10.0	210
WorldBench 6 Score	148
WorldBench 6 Word Score	Superior

WorldBench 6 Tests
Multitasking	171

What You Should Know about the Area-51 ALX

Large Amount of RAM Produces Blazing Performance

Simply put, this computer is likely to offer blazing performance. The large amount of RAM it ships with is more than enough to handle most memory-hungry applications and large files, and as a result the PC won't constantly swap memory to its hard drive.

The more installed memory your PC has, the more applications you can run smoothly at once, and the better the system will perform. Upgrading memory in a desktop after you purchase the PC is simple, but usually it's worthwhile to buy the amount of memory you want preinstalled with the system.

To use more than 4GB of memory on your PC, you need either Windows XP 64-Bit Edition (limited to 128GB) or a 64-bit version of Windows Vista (which can handle 128GB and beyond).